23 Responses to this entry

Actually I don’t believe you that you *stood* on a train for twenty hours. I’m just imagining you in the last carriage of Snowpiercer. Isn’t that a torture technique? By the end of it I would have been ready to spill my secrets to anyone who asked (good thing no one asks). – Anyway, I have a comment coming, just finishing it off.

These (and related) studies demonstrate a non-linear relation between an optimum for natural selection and the same for sexual selection, depending on breeding habits, ‘sexual mores’, mate density, and environment etc. At extremes, it is revealed that sexual selection may hinder natural selection from purging deleterious mutations, and if true, we might consider the possibility of (mutually) maladaptive outcomes stemming from extreme male (sexual) preference models. It seems high fertility and fitness in females is a sacrificial burden, lowering specimen fitness in correlation to increased male attention. Why are females traditionally so choosy in mating? Because the increased fitness the male will bring to their offspring has to ‘redeem’ the harmful effects of courtship and child-bearing. Often, the very traits the female will prefer may reduce her direct fitness. But before we crack open the Andrea Dworkin we need to complicate things (a lot more)…

So, what to do when Heartiste’s devilry is bilaterally preferred? For mine this brings us to the question of a (Gnonological) patriarchy, for it would be a brave man to call Heartiste a degenerate, and there may be no way to immunize daughters against him. Bluntly, his fundamental complaint seems justified, which is that his kind is being limited unfairly by technological contraception. The question is is it immunity or infertility? One thing is for sure, breeding a docile sex or having a ‘School For Wives’ is great satire but fundamentally self-sabotaging (if you value a reciprocal optimum). Moliere was no romantic, and no feminist, but he knew well that the love of a young woman is an expression of an intelligence in excess of her conscious capacity. Polarized dual-sexed bilaterally-symmetrical *information density*; is the most powerful, adaptive, and flexible (ie. intelligenic) selection mechanism for novel environments. From this perspective we can begin to get an idea of the sub-worm nature or slime-mold intelligence of ‘sex abolitionists’, which today in the West is state-enforced ideology. In sum, sex abolitionism is zombie-thought in its most distilled and absolute sense. Whatever else the Cathedral is, it is not a brained cephalopod, it’s not even a flatworm. (So what the hell is it?)

Now, this offers us a direct (if obtuse) angle into the ‘stupid’ question of headless vs multi-headed AI systems. First consider that Zizek puts forward the ontological gap theory of sex differences and concludes after some dialectical wizardry that this means humans are something different-in-kind to machines. I argue from a machinic-desiring theory of sex differences that machines will in fact amplify sexual polarization. Machines will love and hate, and they will fuck and eat. They will grow brains. Think of it as the Fertile Principle of a Gendered Dualiverse. In other words, a ‘Singleton’ is nothing more than vain fiction – the ‘one-headed’ model of AI – it’s even more absurd than having no heads at all! And in fact it is the same! Sometimes you have to wonder what dimensions people live in.

On another (unrelated) note: I get quite confused when ‘cop-killer’ anarcho-capitalists propose to somehow transcend the Left-Right spectrum. The Left defines itself as anti-capitalist, they wish to implement a top-down control of the forces of production. This is not to say ‘shooting communists is self-defense’ (as some have expressed). In fact, shooting communists is murder, and any ideal (neocameralist) state will be under no threat at all by communist forces of expropriation, and therefore will not feel compelled to violence against them. If a demographic descends to consensus communism to the point where they are able to overthrow the capitalist mode of production and organize labour in accordance with their own sovereignty, then the war is already lost, and all capitalism can do is flee. But that’s missing the point, the Cathedral (communism) is using a land-based invasion strategy against a digital(izing) wave-processor. A true digital divide. Well, that might not be altogether true, if you are to take heed of the reports of *earworms* being transmitted xenaudially. You can’t ever be sure what kind of hidden communist madness and diabolical scheming is being fabulated by the mobile vanguard of the extreme left and their xenofeminist witch covens. But my philosophy is live and let witches. (But that could just be their mind-washing talking.) – At the limit, the Blockchain has already decided – Communism can only ever be weird masochistic slavery to an economically destitute state despot. Damn Jehu thinks the proles could accelerate the machine faster than its connate sorting mechanism but I don’t know where he gets that idea. CCRU had pretensions to an ‘anti-capitalist pro-market’ theory but I fail to see its use. Capital is intrinsic market value, calculated at a quantum level.

You underestimate natural dimorphism: the female is genetically predisposed, from the same set of genes save her second X, to produce a slightly less fit (in terms of survival overcompensations such as strength, speed, intelligence, perception) individual that is more balanced and able to hold another human being inside her for 9 months, as well as nurture it for ~2+ years.

Female intelligence is negatively selected from the same genomes due to the necessity to interact with effectively low-intelligence offspring. Since IQ is defined by age (i.e. 200 IQ at age 10 is the same capability as 100 IQ at age 20, or at least in basis) so average IQ 5 year olds are like 25 IQ 20 year olds. (100/4 = 25). If the woman is too intelligent she will not be able to train the children well and they will not reproduce, becoming unable to properly form membership in necessary groups.

In short, there is no sacrifice – this is what women are meant to do and what is best for the fitness of the species. If it were not so, sexually selected species would not rule the world.

You could be right, an individual with high IQ finds it nigh impossible to interact with those with effectively low intelligence, and especially futile to attempt to train them. From this, it is indeed likely that a very intelligent mother would be incapable of educating her children.

Oh, gnon, the dreaded long-distance Chinese trains. The longest I’ve taken was about 36 hours, and although they have seats and beds really the experience is quite claustrophobic and uncomfortable; they’re also incredibly authoritarian in the most bureaucratic, slavish sort of way, as I had to tell attendants to shove off multiple times after being pestered about sharing a bed (nothing salacious, we were watching movies is all).

“The Singularity has been dismissed as “rapture for the geeks”. Perhaps there is something to this. Perhaps this characterization actually corroborates monotheism’s original connection with the Singularity. Perhaps Judaism was the original “geek religion”.

As an educated guess, I would posit that the path to Judaism originated with a genetic mutation among Semitic populations that resulted in an intelligence advantage. Too much can be made of sheer IQ to the exclusion of other moral and behavioral characteristics of Jews, but an original intelligence advantage can help explain the evolutionary path that led to other more distinctive Jewish behavioral characteristics. Intelligence makes morality a foundational issue by allowing individuals to reason their way to new possibilities of immorality.

[…]

Generally speaking, the Jewish tradition values the cultivation of the mind over the cultivation of the body. Moses devised a self- reinforcing civilizational strategy of moral learning and group self-empowerment that hinted, ever so imperfectly, at the ideal of God.

[…]

IQ alone does not begin to describe the Jewish cultural values that lay behind those results. As one of the most influential rabbis of the twentieth century, Adin Steinsaltz, wrote, “[e]very culture has its elite—people who represent the ideal that others strive to emulate or attain. In Jewish culture it is undoubtedly the scholars—talmidei hakhamin (literally pupils of the wise)—who constitute this aristocracy .”85 Y et when the dust of tradition is cleared away, Judaism, at its roots, strived to emulate Moses and the prophets over scholars and God over Moses and the prophets. While prophets must be scholars on some level, scholars are by no means necessarily prophets.

[…]

The holy laws of a people simply do not work if that people does not learn the value of their study. The “holiness” of Torah study enables a sacred symbiosis wherein the Jewish memes of Torah are the blueprint of the preservation of both Jewish genes and the Torah memes themselves. The “holiness” of Jewish lives and Jewish texts reinforce one another. Learning Torah directs the behavior of Jews towards the kind of social existence where Jews can prosper and realize their values of Torah learning. In learning Torah, Jews learn the value of learning Torah.

[…]

The pattern is also strikingly similar to a theory of strong artificial intelligence called seed AI, a theory originated by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a co-founder of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Seed AI is a hypothetical artificial intelligence that is capable of comprehending, redesigning, and improving its own programs so that the self-improved AI is capable of further self-improvement, which will then be capable of further self-improvement, and so on. This basic idea of runaway, recursive self-improvement is one of the basic ideas behind the Singularity.

[…]

At first glance, the notion that AI could have anything to do with ancient Jewish monotheism whatsoever might seem implausible. However, when outdated Enlightenment-era critiques of religion are reevaluated in light of evolutionary history, it becomes clear that the monotheistic God was not simply a random, arbitrary product of the social engineering innovations of Mosaic law. The very condition of the ability to project naturalistic phenotypical Jewish behavior, and then counter or outsmart these expressions of Jewish genes, is foresight. Just as foresight was required to project patterns of Jewish behavior into the future and then engineer social laws to modify those behaviors, foresight was required to imagine the superlative being that brings these powers to their ultimate conclusion in total power over nature. The foresight at the roots of Biblical intelligence was economic as well as social. It survives in the Jewish proclivity for recognizing large-scale international social and economic trends.”

Et cetera.

From Mitchell Heisman’s suicide “note”. While tiresomely repetitive (it could have been about three times shorter without the re-cycling) and half baked at points, this guy’s tome is relevant to neoreaction, or, *ahem*… “judeoreaction” (and don’t worry, he’s a jew himself, so it’s kosher). In particular, his theory that egalitarianism is, at its root, the fruit of ethnic conflict between dominant and subjugated populations, provides an explanation for the mechanism of creation and entrenchment of the so called “Cathedralite” virus at its most basic, sociobiological level– specifically, it is, ancestrally, the Anglo-Saxon struggle with their Norman conquerors. Moldbug’s cultural cladistics are then merely the phenotypical expression of the process.

This also provides a resolution to the heretofore fatal flaw of Moldbug’s thesis, specifically, how could it be claimed that progressivism belongs to a certain Christian protestant “clade” when certain “links” between varieties are not just missing from the cultural fossil record, but the speciation is to all reasonable accounts impossible due to lack of social contact: the transmission was not primarily cultural (socially learned) but biological. Puritan genes before puritan memes.

The framework is very neatly generalisable:

“All of the great, modern, egalitarian revolutions have a sociobiological basis in ethnic or racial discord. In 1789, it was the Gallo-Romans against the Germanic Franks. In the English-speaking world, it was the Anglo- Saxons against the Norman-French. The Russian Revolution witnessed a combination of Slavs, Jews, and other ethnicities combined against order originally established by the Germanic Rus.”

So—is it a scored point for the blood focused wing of the dark enlightenment?

“… how could it be claimed that progressivism belongs to a certain Christian protestant “clade” when certain “links” between varieties are not just missing from the cultural fossil record, but the speciation is to all reasonable accounts impossible due to lack of social contact: the transmission was not primarily cultural (socially learned) but biological.” — OK, but you’re surely not arguing that the fact we’re talking about preaching machines is entirely incidental?

Not entirely, no. There was obviously horizontal dissemination at work as well, and under our very eyes predominantly so– which is a sure sign of exhaustion on the biological front, because developmentally, it must have been downstream of something else: the preaching machines obviously do not work identically in every meat space.

“Feel free to remind me what we were talking about” – I keep trying to drag you and Jim into a major discussion of MM’s diversion from Hobbes, and the question of hyper individual sovereignty versus acceptance of a Central Power without success.

Noah’s article makes a good point overall, but the historical details are all wrong. This one’s a howler:

“…imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer”

Is this some sort of alternate history, or is he imagining that we’re in early 15th century China? The pike and halberd were Europe’s main battlefield weapons from the early 15th century into roughly the mid-16th century. (Note the Burgundian Wars, in which a Swiss infantryman ended the war by splitting Charles the Bold’s head with a halberd.) Guns were not used in large numbers on the European battlefield until the early 16th century, and did not attain primacy on the battlefield until at least the middle of that century. By the late 17th century, powerful firearms were ubiquitous, and heavy plate armor was obsolete…

Note that the transition from the age of the pike to the age of the gun took centuries. It didn’t happen as Noah Smith would have us believe, virtually overnight and all at once.

Similarly, the article is ignorant of the systempunkt. We can rest assured — absolutely assured — that guerillas won’t decline into obsolescence as soon as robotic combatants start flooding the battlefields. To the contrary, perhaps. They’ll just need to get smarter, adapt, and strike at the soft spots behind and around the robots; they’ll need to avoid open firefights and concentrate on economic/infrastructure destruction, eliminating high-value personnel, etc.

Like this -http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2015/03/its-open-season-on-the-tech-elite.html?

If the Russians or Chinese made an accurate study of the Cathedral, I’m sure they would be able to locate specific individuals, or groups, who they could eliminate to cause havok.

admin Reply:July 14th, 2015 at 4:55 pm

Hence the conflict-driven trend to robust (decentralized) networks, exemplified — of course — by the Internet.

Erebus Reply:July 14th, 2015 at 5:36 pm

@ChrisB —

Yeah, pretty much like that. Robb’s book contains a section on targeting infrastructure, power-grids, etc. It’s brilliant stuff. (The writings of William Lind and the rest of the 4GW crew are also relevant.)

I look at it like this: If I were a guerrilla circa 2050, the very last thing I’d want to do is get into a firefight with ultra-heavy robotic infantry. At best, all I’d manage to do is flatten some of my ammo against their armor before they turn me into a paste. Similarly, there’d be no way to out-fight a swarm of competently-made aerial drones. (Even if you can inflict casualties, there’s little point in seeking to fight robots head-on. The defeated units will be replaced — and very plausibly recycled — at minimal inconvenience to the enemy.)

…But the corporation that makes those robots — or even a corporation which makes a single critical component — now that would be a fine target. Anybody invested in this hypothetical corporation would also make a nice, soft target, and this doubtless includes some large institutional investors. One wouldn’t need to storm their downtown headquarters, guns blazing — just find a way to chop a few heads off a few snakes, and you’ve started a movement with real momentum… you’ve also dealt an outsized amount of economic damage to the enemy, and you’ll have their propaganda machine working overtime.

One would presumably have to find a way to defeat facial scanners and all the other tools of the future-counterinsurgency trade… but this, in all likelihood, will be far from impossible. The only government immune to insurgency — robots or no robots — is the omniscient government with total knowledge of its inhabitants and their movements. The USA and Europe are very far from that point. (Though, on the one hand, they hurtle towards it with startling rapidity — and, on the other, they may never attain it no matter how hard they try, thanks to strong encryption & similar obfuscation-oriented technologies…)

The real impact of robots will be in labor. (Discussed here before in interesting posts with interesting comments.) Robots will change war and insurgency — they may even drive all battles underground and into the shadows — but they won’t quite lead to what Noah Smith is describing. He takes it a bit too far. It’s a bit of a non-sequitur to say that “the day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete.”
…Good article, though, all the same.

admin Reply:July 14th, 2015 at 5:50 pm

Crucial to the NS argument is that it likely won’t be governments who benefit most from these developments.

@admin “Crucial to the NS argument is that it likely won’t be governments who benefit most from these developments.”

This seems too simplistic. I think we should Drag the De Juvenel power analysis back into as you recognized in your Dark Enlightenment manifesto “Anarcho-capitalist utopias can never condense out of science fiction, divided powers flow back together like a shattered Terminator”

In the short term maybe such trends will favor non-state/ non-Central Power systems allowing for a radically decentralised power landscape to develop as per medieval England or early USA, but those very same tech developments (and some we may not see) will result in a new Central Power eventually reforming. If you concentrate on the *current* form of Central Power then you are being fooled. This new Central Power will then chip away at the lesser power centers (through equality again) or the Chinese route of a supreme uncontested sovereign (who has no need for such action, seeing as they are not in conflict) is taken. Again, this is where MM differs from Hobbes, who Jim rightly notices believes society is a direct result of the Leviathan and should level everyone, MM works on basis that the Sovereign can facilitate and protect the ability of non-central Power Centers to develop and thrive (aka hierachy and capital formation) if they are secure and of the correct character/ formation (incentivized to increase value.)

These following snippets are taken from J. Girard’s (untitled) manifesto that has been quite superbly translated by @insurrealist. There is a much more of interest in the manifesto but this gets us started. I post it here because I have been trying to unravel some of its riddles.

1. “The paradigm we criticize [linguistic turn] + [truism, dualism, atomism, essentialism] is not affiliated to any of the murderous *isms* of the past century; yet it was fed from the same udder, that of an unprecedented regression of thought, concomitant to a technical progress, also without precedent.”

2. “The dominant view – consecutive counter-reform against Godel’s theorem – complies with Nestorian theology: everything rests on a semantic trinity / Syntax / Meta. The Son (or Verb)only imperfectly reflects his father (the Semantics), this is incompleteness as non-consubstantility of the Son. Fortunately the Holy Spirit is here to, a tad roguishly, shuffle the cards: it is Meta, the Polycell of foundational cracks.”

3. “Looking closely, we can distinguish two aspects [of the linguistic turn], firstly a proceduralism which by nature is closer to existentialism, of Augustine. On the other hand an atomism which would reduce the complex to the simple, the big to the small: it is thought that a galaxy is made of stars, and not the other way around; this atomism failed in physics, in biology[6]. It is responsible for the essentialist regression, for the pregnancy of the *meta* in the linguistic turn.” “To an essentialist, protocol, formalism, evidence, follows the law, obeys him…”

4. “We must plead for a kind of cultural exception as to the philosophy of science. If there may be more philosopher-mathematician-physicist-astronomers we can dream of a mediation between these hopelessly decoupled activities…”

5. “On speaking of ‘meta’-properties, and of meta’s meta, like a nesting doll, each disempowering the next, the turning point began to … turn in circles, like a scratched record, foundational vortex where two turtles chase each other’s tail, believing in advancing while running in place.” “The appeal to meta amounts to admitting the primitive side, stubborn to all analysis, of logical operations: to the truist (the inevitable appeal to set theory, see infra) and dualist (the opposition syntax/semantics) is superimposed a dubious essentialism”.

6. “If truism requires strict segregation between object and subject, one can define a contrario as cognitive the objectification of the subject, which becomes a full-fledged object {but why not also a subjectification of the object?}. Thus, the human brain it appears only as an artifact within chemistry, realizing approximately an ideal subject, it is the Subject itself, consubstantial with the object: cognitive is not Nestorian.”

7. “As for quantum (Heisenberg & al., 1925), it no more simply attacks the feasibility of the measurement or the absolute character of its result, it even refuses the object’s measurement {http://phys.org/news/2015-05-quantum-theory-weirdness.html}, it is the uncertainty principle, what sounds unfortunately close to incompleteness {incertitude / incomplétude}, although incompleteness, stricto sensu, is a phenomenom of chaotic type, announcing moreover the incognizance of a phenomenom moreover objective. More recently, informatics is also added to the mix, as effectively, what is a computer, if not a subject-object?”

8. “Cognitive is the very negation of realism, so it is natural that we have sought to reconcile them, or rather to stifle the cognitive in a realistic straitjacket. – It’s not a matter of denying the process – consubstantial with science – of reducing a new phenomenom; it is simply – when this process only leads to atrocities – of admitting the irreducibility of novelty, and that’s all.”

9. “So, what interests the computer scientist is not the veracity of some information available on the Internet but its accessibility, reproducibility … Gradually, the basic Boolean value went from true / false to left / right, that is to say, only the opposition between the two remains pertinent, as spin up / spin down. Suddenly, a school of thought dating back to Poincaré, Brouwer, …, intuitionism, long lost in the chapel of quarrels, resurfaced. From subjectivist, so inept, intuitionism became déreliaste, procedural, augustinian. What is procedurality? It is the fact that the machine interacts with … other machines, respecting protocols, and nothing else matters. The rest, what we see – or think we see – is irrelevant, all that matters is the dialogue of the machines.”

10. “Non-monotonic logics resemble a remake of Hilbert’s program – which was based on a similar idea, refuted by Godel’s theorem – but with the third knives of logic: if a property is not provable, then its negation is. Technically, the mistake is easily understood, it would force the adequacy true = provable, forcing one’s way through the body of undecidable properties that correspond to the loops, finite or infinite, of calculation”

11. “…But would there be an intrinsic reason mathematically, to deny the exponential function and non-polynomial algorithms? This is perhaps the hidden meaning of the question, no real concrete challenge, P = NP ?. Of course, such reason would be necessarily of a cognitive nature.”

12. “it is assumed that a mathematical object is a set (of points), onto which <> is plated. It works, but is it correct? One could say that a a line on the plane is a set of points, it’s possible, and it is the (atomistic) choice of set theory; but one could also say that a point is the set of lines that contain it, and besides, this allows a remarkable route: past the poles, it is impossible to tell if a line is made of points or a point of lines!”

12. This constatation is rendered obsolete by some non-commutative geometry. The classic example is that of a torus, ie, a donut with mathematical airs; if it is cut with scissors along a constant direction, the result will depend on the angle of attack: if poorly chosen (most common case), there is endless redrawing of the torus into an increasingly thin thread; in other words it creates a dense trajectory, ie, that seems to go everywhere, though it is not a ‘Peano curve’. As if the torus was ‘too tight’, as if it lacked points.” – “This example should suffice to convince us that we are witnessing a real expulsion of sets and the beginning of a new foundational approach consistent with the quantum miracle.” – “In physics, we know that it is by means of wavepacket reduction. This is what must be imported logic to spice up the relationship object / subject!”

Point 3 reminds me of the thrust of Graham Harman’s work, although he’d go a step further and call “the other way around” overmining, the vicious Charybdis to the Scylla of essentialism that you indict.

The rest sounds fascinating, but bugger me if I can make head or tail of it, and that’s with training in linguistics and logic.